"Sometimes a franchise just has a big, black mark over it and no amount of wishful thinking can turn the tide..."-Jaap Still

"Brilliant use of an instructional picture book."-Kyle in Newport News

"Does Met$tra have a gambling problem?"-Erik Love

"Hasta la vista baby. I throw up the white flag."-Joe

"I'm still a fan, but enough is enough."-Meet the Mets

"I watch the grass grow - it's more exciting."-David

"Freaking Chipper Jones. I HATE Freaking Chipper Jones."-Dave Murray

"Good God man, what have you done??!! You've released the genie from the bottle. I see the showers and toilets backing up at Shea, emergency landings at LGA, unusual tides in Flushing Bay, and when they break ground for the new stadium the construction gang will unearth and disturb some ancient Indian burial ground for unlucky and cursed members of the Iroquois nation...Blaspheme no more Metstradamus! You are tempting the fates!"-The Metmaster

Sunday, August 03, 2008

I don't normally blog when I'm at the high seas or the desert or wherever crazy place I'm at, but I felt the need to just say this:

That tying hit on Saturday night against the Astros was the single dumbest play I've ever seen. Dumb. I'm kinda glad that the JetBlue flight I was on wasn't equipped with XM radio, or I probably would have been deemed an unruly passenger on the flight and had gotten arrested. Two runners scoring on top of each other? Really?

I don't know of the other circumstances of that game. I don't want to know. That play is all I need to know. I knew I needed a vacation from everyday life ... now I know I need a vacation from this baseball team. I will say that if that was Paul Lo Duca behind the plate, he would have tagged both runners out, stepped on them on the way back from the dugout, and then gone to a club in Long Island and picked up both their daughters.

Charity, it would be too exhausting to hold a grudge against all the players who used steroids. I am saving my energy to hate just the ones who lied to federal investigators, grand juries or senators. Let's forgive Paul.

Metstradamus, in protest over Pete Rose not being in the Hall of Hate, I refuse to vote for anyone else, no matter how much I loathe them. Anyway, I tried to go back and vote again, from all three computers in our house, and it wouldn't let me.

Sorry to further disrupt your vacation, and it is hard to pick on Castro, but if he was really paying attention, he would have planted his foot on the plate. The first runner was a force out. And I think there were two outs at the time.

Given everything that went wrong offensively and defensively on this road trip, they still would have been 3 and 3 if the bullpen held 8th inning leads. The pen is downright awful.

Ron Darling was very candid after Saturday night's game. Bases loaded in the ninth, one out, leading by 2 runs and we can't get two sub .220 hitters out? If you can't do that, you got huge problems in your pen.

The biggest thing for me is the walks. How many times do our relivers walk the lead-off man? It's ridiculous. Game 3 in Fla, Smith walks the lead-off man in the 8th before Uggla's bomb. Heilman walks the lead-off man during both appearances in Houston - both score. And Wagner walks Ausmus in the 9th on Saturday, moving the tying run to second base. Awful pitching.

Well, at least our new pitcher, Eddie Kunz, has arrived. He did make a throwing error, but we desperately needed someone new, and he seems pretty good. I didn't have the benefit of hearing our home announcers, so I didn't get any inside information on him.

The New York Times report on Ryan Church saying that he "spent much of his time sitting alone in the clubhouse, sometimes with a water bottle resting against the side of his head" worried me. He is not supposed to exercise til he is symptom-free, why does he have a water bottle held to his head? And considering that plane travel seemed to exacerbate the problem before, WHY take him to Houston and back if he's not going to play?

What's with all the knee jerk votes for Victorino, I think we all have a bone to pick with Glavine first. Without Glavine's ineptitude we don't even talk about the Phillies, we talk about how we got bounced out in the first round of the playoffs instead.

Although, Mota should have a place in the hall already considering he threw at Mike Piazza two different times in two different SPRING TRAINING GAMES, then hot footed it out of dodge when he found out Mike was looking for him. I don't know Metstra, I think you may have to put multiple inductees in this year.

Katherine, I'm not sure what we saw Kunz do can be considered good, he was baled out by a great play by Easley (and reyes/2b umpire) and by lack of plate discipline (hitting into a double play on a 3-0 pitch is the second most unforgivable sin in baseball. The first being the same situation but with a triple play.) He looked awfully nervous, especially after making that error. I chalk it up to nerves but I'm not ready to jump on the wagon yet. Interesting that Manual used him with a lefty leading off.

Jdon, there was one out, but you're right - the first runner would have been a force out. So even if the 2nd runner scores, we're still up a run.

Weird play.

And what was up with that stupid play by Robinson Can'tcel yesterday? He had a huge lead, got a huge jump, had a righty batter at the plate, and he STILL gets thrown out. Which just shows how bad of an idea that was.

Even though Willie Randolf made his share of mistakes as Mets manager, the team is starting to show why they are simply a .500 ballclub over the last year or so. We saw a nice pop around the All-Star break when Poop Manuel took over....however that is proving to be short-lived. The manager ultimately takes the fall for the ineptitude of the players...that's just a fact in sports fair or not...but I don't believe that the manager was the focal point of the team's failures as many blogs and posts on this site would lead you to believe.

Next to take the fall...Minaya for his inactivity at the trade deadline and watching the rest of the world and the season go bye.

Minaya has just done a bad job. You can say who was out there at the trade deadline, but you cannot say "who was out there in the off season?"-- when he basically committed himself to Alou and El Duque(as a starter) after all their injuries and did nothing about obtaining backups. He also decided that he was keeping the same bunch of gasoline cans in his bullpen who had blown things up last year. Just unacceptable. Yes, he made a good trade. But where was the plan? And I will not even mention how badly he oversaw the Church concussion situation. Oops! I just did.

Let's all relax and calm down. A day off and extra days rest for Pelf and the Padres are in town (i know they swept us back a two months ago but its a perfect time for revenge) and then another showdown with the Marlins. If we can get through this week 4-2 we have the weakened Pirates ahead.